FSA reports 54 ‘food incidents’ in United Kingdom in Q3

In case you’ve been wondering about “food incidents” across the pond, the Food Standards Agency for the United Kingdom is out with its report for the July through September 2016 period. The report includes those incidents where an alert was issued by the FSA to recall or withdraw products from sales.

This quarterly summary also includes information on investigations we supported relating to potential widespread risks from food poisoning and harmful contamination. Over the three-month period, the agency issued 54 food notices, of which 30 were allergy alerts. The top three undeclared allergens were eggs, nuts and mustard.

The FSA also led, and in some cases supported 11 incidents linked to possible risks of food poisoning and 10 to do with physical contamination. It also issued two food alerts relating to pet food. The Food Standards Agency is responsible for animal feed regulations and the enforcement of pet food labelling through local authorities in England and Wales.

The published information describes the details of the incident, the level of risk to consumers and what action we, industry and local authorities took.

The FSA has collated this data to make it easier for consumers to access incident information.

“We hope this data is useful for people who want to know more about the incidents we have been handling recently,” says Richard Hoskin, head of the Incidents and Resilience Unit at the FSA. “It’s a retrospective look covering food incidents from July to September 2016. These aren’t live incidents but the list provides all of the important aspects of them in one place.”

Each year, a small number of incidents are put forward for a detailed review so that the FSA can make improvements and identify lessons learned. To get details of all the latest food withdrawals and recalls, anyone may sign for email updates and get the latest food and allergy alerts sent as an SMS text message to a mobile phone.